Chapter 18
James returned the next day in high spirits.
What happened to his co-worker was horrible, but the silver lining was that James got to stand in for him at an important pitch with a large and popular alcohol company.
He proposed an entirely new direction for their campaign.
The company signed with them the next day.
Before this, James had been feeling burned out.
He was beginning to wonder if he should jump ship, or else take time off, go back to school.
But this was an exciting win, even if making cocktails sexier than they already were didn’t mean much in the grand scheme of things.
In the beginning, James’s journey from Holme back to the city felt cursed.
He got a ticket for speeding, even though it was the middle of the night.
When he finally made it to Manhattan, he discovered we’d forgotten to shut his apartment windows, and all his things were soaked with rain.
Silver’s litter, which sat just beneath the bathroom window, had calcified into one big clump.
He tried his best to sleep, but the bedsheets were damp, and he couldn’t stop thinking about the litter.
He broke the clump into bits and flushed them, then filled the litter box with a fresh layer.
Even though Silver wouldn’t be using it for another few days, he didn’t like thinking about that smelly mass.
By the time the dryer cycle ended, and the sheets were ready to use, the sun was rising.
He took two caffeine pills and went to the office, where his manager told him he wasn’t needed until the next day.
With his Tuesday begrudgingly free, James went to IKEA.
IKEA made him feel like a kid again. Something about furniture you could build yourself.
He picked out a few things for me. A walnut dresser for my clothes, a lamp for my side of the bed, and a blue stuffed shark named BL?HAJ, that reminded him of my sharp canine teeth.
He had Swedish meatballs and cinnamon rolls for lunch.
Everything improved from there: karaoke, winning the pitch.
He even had time to see his colleague’s daughter, Arabella, who just started kindergarten.
“You forget how small everything is when you’re a kid,” he said.
“The desks, their chairs. We used to think that was normal sized.”
Arabella was super cute. She had just learned the word obviously, and she tagged it to her every sentence, on both ends: “Obviously I’m hungry obviously.” James bought Arabella a cookie. To this, she said, “Thank you, God!” Arabella had just started going to church.
“It was so easy to make her happy, I kind of felt like God,” said James.
Everybody seemed to think of James as God.
Was it because he was tall, or because he was just so nice?
James was a little bit like God, I thought, in that his whole thing was helping the less capable.
I let myself get carried away with this analogy for a bit.
James was a great storyteller. He nodded with his lips pursed when he wasn’t speaking, like it was a measure against interrupting.
He only broke eye contact if you did it first. While he spoke, I felt myself laughing for the first time since he went away.
Here he was, giving me the gift of laughter, not knowing my secret.
He was animated and pink-cheeked, boyish, even, his hair overgrown and curling over his ears in such a perfect C that I ached to run my finger inside it, like scraping out the dredges of tiger balm from its miniscule tin.
“You, what about you? You hung out with Isabelle?”
My mind returned to Silver. “My mother called,” I blurted.
“Oh, that’s great.” James reached for my hand. “That’s great, right? Was that okay?”
I looked at my phone, half expecting for it to still be connected, my mother listening to our conversation hundreds of miles away. “We got into a fight about money,” I said. “She thinks I’m taking advantage of you.”
“You, taking advantage of me?” James smiled.
“It’s not funny.” I was smiling now, too, though I didn’t know why. “You’re the reason I’ll still have a roof over my head in a week.”
“That’s not taking advantage. I offered, you’re my girlfriend.” James delivered girlfriend with a lilt.
“But she didn’t know that. To her, you’re just this stranger.”
“You haven’t told her about me?”
“We haven’t spoken in a year, remember?”
“Yeah, to be honest, I still don’t fully understand what happened. You were in a crisis, weren’t you? You needed her, and she wasn’t there for you.”
“She was the one in a crisis.” My cheeks warmed. “I wasn’t there for her. She’s sick.”
“She’s sick?”
I wanted to take it back. It seemed dramatic to call my mother sick when James’s mother had spent two birthdays in a hospital.
“I mean, she’s fine. She’s just not very well.
I can’t explain. She doesn’t eat. She needed me.
I told her I was coming home for good, and then I left her.
She’s all alone, she hates being alone in that house. ”
“I didn’t know that,” James said. “I’m sorry.”
I said nothing.
“I’m sorry,” he repeated. “I’m not trying to upset you. But what you’re saying, it’s pretty intense. You didn’t have to deal with that on your own, I could’ve helped you.”
“Don’t act like she’s such a burden,” I said, and then immediately regretted introducing the idea that my mother could be a burden.
James took my hands, which had flown up to pull at my hair. “I’m not trying to fight you. We’re on the same side.”
“We shouldn’t be talking about her like this.”
“You’re very protective of your mother. It’s like you think you have to baby her. And I understand it better now that you’ve told me more. But it’s okay to talk about her, to feel things about her. You’re human, she’s human. You can’t live your life protecting her from that.”
My mother wasn’t human, she was my mother. It was pointless to discuss any further. I could see now that his understanding of her would forever be filtered through his disapproval.
“James,” I said, and something in my voice must have changed, because his expression shifted. “I have something to tell you.”
James’s eyes narrowed. In them I could see the reflection of the window behind me.
“What?”
I paused. In that moment I knew that only I could puncture the pause, and this meant I could also extend it. I could make it last long enough for me to memorize the way he looked them, newly young, as if Holme had restored the fat in his cheeks. “I’m really sorry about this.”
“You’re scaring me. Sorry about what?”
I told him. He didn’t believe me, so I took him to the bedroom. First, a brief silence. Then a sharp intake of breath. Recoiling beneath the doorframe, looking at me, he said, as if this were the most unbelievable part: “You tucked her in.”
“I thought she might be cold.”
“Cold? She’s dead.”
Then he started to breathe very quickly. His body gave a great jerk forward, then back. “No, but why’ve you done this”—he gestured at Silver’s tucked body—“why didn’t you say anything?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was waiting for the right moment.”
“You thought the right moment to tell me my cat died was a full day after it happened? Fuck, are you actually mentally unwell?” Then he stepped back, once, twice, until he was in the hallway, out of sight.
I followed James into the guest bathroom. The fur around the drain had dried, fine as dandelion fluff. “You bathed her,” he said.
I nodded.
“Why did you keep her here? How long has she been lying there? God.”
“She was cold,” I said, this time with less conviction.
Then James began to cry. At first I didn’t understand what was happening.
He lifted his hands to cover his face, as if embarrassed, and lowered to sit on the floor.
Numbly I slid down next to him. The porcelain of the tub vibrated with his breathing, cool against my neck.
Just atop the crest of his right ear were two freckles, one of them perfectly circular and dark, the other one small, curved like a comma.
I hadn’t noticed them before. I stroked the gully where his ear met his neck, the way I did with Silver, the way my mother used to do when she braided my hair.
He flinched. “Sorry,” we said in unison, then again, simultaneously: “Sorry.”
I wondered what might’ve happened if I told James the news earlier, as soon as Bruno found Silver on the beach.
Whether he would’ve been angry, or devastated, or even worried about me—like he always was, like Isabelle predicted he would be.
Certainly he wouldn’t have cried, at least not in front of me.
He would’ve compartmentalized the information, dealt with the aftermath.
Buried her, packed the bags. He would’ve accepted the news, romanticized it, even.
She always loved the sea! There would be no dead body to evidence the loss, no fight with girlfriend ringing in his mind.
Are you actually mentally unwell? Probably. I have something to tell you.
But this was the reality. I made it happen. I had to accept it.
When James lowered his hands, his cheeks were fever-red.
“I’m really sorry. I unlocked the door.” It was terrible to say this aloud, nearly insulting. There was just a syllable of a difference between Silver dead and Silver alive.
Small twitch of his head, an acknowledgment. “Was it an accident?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t thinking.”
A humorless laugh, awful. He couldn’t meet my eye. “You let me talk about Arthur and IKEA and Arabella for half an hour. You heard me talk about her litter box and you still didn’t say anything.”
“I’m really sorry.” It was a pitiful statement. James did not respond. I counted his breaths, five full ones before he spoke, a catch on the sixth.
“I have so many things to say, but what I really can’t stop thinking about is the fact that you didn’t tell me. Why didn’t you tell me, Katie?”